Daniella Jung spent a decade learning what Korean beauty brands get wrong when they try to sell in the United States. Now she runs the company that fixes it.
Jung founded Muskat Beauty Inc. in Los Angeles in 2025 as the North American arm of her Seoul-based distribution company, Most Inc., which she launched in 2019. With a staff of 25, Muskat is on track to bring in $60 million in revenue this year by handling go-to-market strategy for Korean skin-care labels including Biodance, Celimax, CosRX, Purito Seoul, Torriden, VT Cosmetics and NuTexture.
Her approach was shaped by two earlier jobs: demand forecasting at Apple, then recruiting Korean beauty brands to sell on Amazon. "I still remember that I had to make 200 cold calls convincing [brands], 'you have to sell on Amazon,'" Jung tells Fashionista. At the time, most Korean brands were chasing China, not the United States. "I saw a huge, huge opportunity for Korean beauty for U.S. consumers," she says.
That early read on the market now informs how Jung sequences a brand's retail rollout, treating Costco, Target and Sephora as distinct puzzles instead of one playbook. Costco buys by SKU, not by brand, picking only a handful of bestsellers, which is how Biodance ended up selling 24-packs of its hydrogel masks there. At Sephora, buyers want founder philosophy and ingredient story, a conversation Jung says never comes up with Costco. This fall, Muskat used that targeting to land Purito Seoul and Aromatica inside Target's Beauty Studio, placing Aromatica as the lineup's only Korean hair-care brand on the strength of its scalp-care line, including the Rosemary Root Enhancer and Rosemary Scalp Scaling Shampoo.
Jung is explicit that brands should not launch everywhere at once, steering newer labels away from an immediate debut at Costco or Walmart because of how those retailers structure promotions. She also pushes back on habits Korean brands bring from their home market, where 50%-off deals, buy-one-get-one offers and gifts with purchase are standard growth tools. "Protecting the brand equity by controlling the retail price is fairly important," she says of the U.S. market, steering clients toward sanctioned moments like the Sephora Savings Event or Black Friday instead of constant discounting.
Before any of that sequencing happens, Jung is screening for one thing: proof of virality that already exists outside her control. "These days, buyers really want similar things from K-beauty, which is virality, because consumers discover brands on social media and then they find them in a retail store," she says, adding that momentum on TikTok and Amazon's rankings has to arrive before Muskat gets involved. "It's not something that we can create in a short period of time."
Jung has also set a ceiling on her own ambition for Muskat, resisting pressure to turn it into a sprawling, discount-driven conglomerate. "We don't want to work with 100 different brands and discount them and work with all of the retailers, but we want to work as an adviser for the brand," she says. Her goal for the company, as she puts it, is simpler: to become multiple retailers' best friend when it comes to Korean beauty curation.
